Clasificación del Daño

Although anthropophagy, the fear of being eaten, to which S 925 and the sanction of Formula Group (2) clearly allude, may seem unwarranted nowadays, it is not only commonly alluded to in medieval infernal imagery, but it is also a primeval fear of humans.80 The danger of being attacked and eventually eaten by wild animals was perhaps still real in Anglo-Saxon times and thus the fear of being eaten by them can be regarded as an objective fear. As such, it may have influenced the development of the Mouth of Hell as a monster with animal traits in Anglo-Saxon England.81 There were, however, also many legends of monsters, animal and human monsters, that devour humans in remote and wild landscapes or at the ‘edge of the world’.82In the Anglo-Saxon context, Beowulf’s Grendel is an obvious example, but such creatures also appear in the Liber monstrorum, for instance, which speaks of cannibalistic giants who catch people and eat them.83

In infernal imagery, anthropophagic fears are connected with the cauldron motif, with demonic animals, anthropomorphic demons eating the damned in hell, and with the Mouth of Hell imagery, which represents the entrance into hell as the mouth of a monster, often in the shape of an animal. All of these variants appear in Anglo-Saxon sanctions. The sanctions of S 925 and Formula Group (2) examined above contain the cauldron motif. In the sanctions of S 364 from CE 901 and S 914 infernal and

80 _{On an anthropological discussion of anthropophagy, see e.g. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth:}

Anthropology and Anthropophagy(New York, 1979).

81 _{J. R. M. Galpern, ‘The Shape of Hell in Anglo-Saxon England’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation,}

California at Berkeley Univ., 1977), p. 151. Garry Schmidt, however, has doubted that fear of wild animals influenced the Mouth of Hell motif, see hisIconography, pp. 17-18.

82 _{Cf. Pehl, ‘Menschenfresser’, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. E. Hoffmann-}

Krayer and H. Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbücher zur deutschen Volkskunde, Abteilung 1 Aberglaube, 10 vols. (Berlin, 1927-42), VI, 151-4.

83 _{Liber monstrorum I.33, as in A. Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the} Beowulf-Manuscript(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 254-316, at 276.

demonic animals eat the damned in hell.84 In the following, I shall examine the sanction of S 947 because it may be a very early example of Satan devouring the damned as the Mouth of Hell. Moreover, Satan’s devouring of the damned may even make him a conveyer of the damned into hell instead of the more common animal Mouth of Hell. In the following, I shall first present the sanction of S 947 and then place it into the context of the Mouth of Hell imagery.

The sanction of S 947 from CE 1016 combines three motifs: burning in the fire of Gehenna, being in the company of notorious traitors and being devoured:

Si quis autem, diabolica illectus prauitate, et hoc donum in aliud quam quod constituimus peruertere molitus fuerit, maneat aeternaliter retrusus inter flammiuomas aestuantis gehennae

incorruptiones lugubre sibi solium uendicans, inter tres

nefandissimos proditores Christi, Iudam, Annan et Caiphan, et in Satanae faucibus maneat deglutiendus, omnium infernalium morsibus carnificum sine fine laceretur, nisi hic digna satisfactione emendare curauerit, quod contra nostrum decretum inique commisit (S 947; representing Formula Group 21)85

The combination of these three motifs is fairly complex. The conjunction etbetween

Caiphan and in Satanae divides the sanction into two principal sections. The sanction’s punishment clause begins with the first maneat, andmaneatis repeated in the part following the above-mentioned conjunction et. The firstmaneat-part is used for expressing that the damned person remains in hell’s fire, while the second

84_{For a discussion of S 914, see below, pp. 146-8.}

85 _{‘Yet, if someone enticed by diabolical viciousness labours to overturn this donation in anything} other than what we have determined, eternally he shall remain thrust back within the flame-spitting imperishableness of the blazing Gehenna, among the three most impious traitors of Christ, Judas, Ananias and Caiaphas, and he shall remain in Satan’s jaws in order to be swallowed down, endlessly he shall be torn to pieces by the bites of all infernal executioners, unless he takes care to correct here [on earth] by proper amends what he commissioned unjustly against our decree’. The same threat of punishment also appears in the sanction of S 63, which is, however, a post-Conquest forgery, see R.

Fleming, ‘Monastic Lands and England’s Defence in the Viking Age’, EHR100 (1985), 247-65, at

maneat-part expresses that the damned person remains in Satan’s mouth. The past participle (retrusus) in the first maneat-part indicates that the damned one entered hell by being thrust there. In the second maneat-part the damned remain in Satan’s mouth to be swallowed down. Further infernal and diabolical motifs are attached to these two principal punishments without any syntactic markers as to how those motifs relate to the maneat-phrases to which they are linked. The infernal motif of the company of three of Jesus’ traitors is linked to the first maneat-phrase and the diabolical motif of demons eating the damned person in the form of morsels (as in S 925) is connected to the second maneat-phrase.86 Hence, there seem to have been two basic punishments in S 947, whereby the first uses infernal imagery and the latter diabolical imagery: a) remaining thrust back in the fire of hell, which is the most common infernal punishment, in the company of Judas, Annas and Caiaphas, which is also common, and b) remaining in Satan’s jaws to be swallowed and eaten by demons.

The question is whether the damned first remain in Satan’s mouth for a while and are then devoured by him and finally, having been devoured by Satan, are then again eaten by demons.87 In this case, Satan’s jaws would represent the Mouth of Hell and, so one must assume, hell would then be Satan’s belly. However, the two motifs could also be read as variants of the same sentiment, the statement that the damned are in Satan’s jaws and will be swallowed down would then simply be repeated with a variant, namely the statement that the damned are eaten as morsels by demons. In

86_{On famous damned persons in hell, see Chapter 3 below.}

87_{There is similar, although far more explicit and vivid diabolical imagery that depicts the devouring} of human damned by diabolical monsters, which in the course of the Middle Ages were turned into devils, see A. J. Kabir, ‘From Twelve Devouring Dragons to theDeveles Ers: the Medieval History of an Apocryphal Punitive Motif’, ASNSL238 (2001), 280-98. If the sanction of S 947 alludes to this motif, it certainly does so very implicitly and even rather clumsily.

this case, both activities can be presumed to take place within hell itself. I would like to suggest that the sanction’s imagery is so ambiguous because it represents a very early and not yet fully developed example of Satan devouring the damned as the Mouth of Hell. Mouth of Hell imagery was developed in Anglo-Saxon England, and it became common infernal imagery from about CE 1200 onwards. As indicated above, it presents the mouth or jaws of a monster as the entrance into Hell. In Anglo- Saxon illuminations and literature that monster is usually in the shape of an animal.88 Garry Schmidt has discussed the appearance of Satan as a devourer of the damned as

a post-Anglo-Saxon development.89 However, Satan is described as the Mouth of

Hell in Vercelli 4:

ne cumaþ þa næfre of þæra wyrma seaðe 7 of þæs dracan ceolan þe is Satan nemned. Þær æt his ceolan is þæt fyr gebet, þæt eall helle mægen on his wylme for þæs fyres hæto forweorðeð (Vercelli 4.46-8)90

Satan is presented as a dragon here, but it is only a small step from an animal-like Satan to a Satan whose description lacks references to animal or human characteristics. Garry Schmidt has argued that Satan was ‘unlike the hell mouth […]

88_{For pictorial representations of the Mouth of Hell, see Karkov,Text and Picture, Plates IIb, VIII,}

XLIVb, XLVa. For a discussion of these illuminations, see Schmidt, Iconography, pp. 67-71;

Galpern, ‘Shape of Hell’, pp. 35-7, 41. In The Whale(62b-81) the Mouth of Hell is presented as a whale’s mouth; all references to The Whale are to The Old English Physiologus, ed. A. Squires, Durham Medieval Texts 5 (Durham, 1988), pp. 41-5. The Mouth of Hell also appears in several Old English homilies: ÆCHom II.80-1; Napier 29 (p. 141/ 23-5) and 40 (p. 181/ 7-10); all references to

the Napier homilies are to Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst

Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, ed. A. S. Napier, Sammlung englischer Denkmäler in kritischen Ausgaben 4 (Berlin, 1883). A homily similar to Vercelli 9, printed as Homily L alongside Vercelli 9 inThe Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. G. Scragg, EETS os 300 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 159- 83 (the Mouth of Hell motif appears in lines 121-2).

89_{Schmidt,Iconography, p. 88.}

90_{‘[they] never come out of the pit of snakes and of the throat of the dragon which is called Satan.} There in his throat is the fire attended to, so that the entire host is destroyed in his burning because of the fire’s heat’; all references to the Vercelli Homilies are toVercelli Homilies, ed. Scragg; cf. Napier 40 (p. 188/ 9-10), which presents the devil as the Mouth of Hell, although again in the form of a dragon.

never a conveyor into hell but exclusively a torment’.91 In the light of Garry Schmidt’s findings, in S 947 Satan devours the damned as a kind of torment suffered in hell. However, distinguishing between the Mouth of Hell as an entrance to hell and Satan eating the damned in hell is not always easy. In Vercelli 4, Satan’s throat is clearly the metaphorical place of hell and the damned are tormented within this hellish throat by fire and later also by cold, both of which are regulated by Satan’s breath (52-5). Thus, Satan neither appears as a conveyer into hell nor is he presented as being in hell, because Satan himself is hell.

As the sanction of S 947 emphasizes in its first maneat-phrase that the damned shall remain thrust back in the fire and in its second maneat-part that they shall remain in the Satan’s jaws, Satan’s jaws may indeed be a variant of hell, which would be indicated by the parallel maneat-construction. However, in contrast to the first

maneat-phrase, the secondmaneat-phrase contains a further indication of movement, because the damned remain in Satan’s jaws only to be swallowed down, perhaps to be then eaten again by demons. Thus, if the draftsman of S 947 may have had a motif like that presented by Ananya Kabir in mind, he presented it in an abbreviated form in S 947.92 In any case, S 947 is curiously ambiguous in its presentation of Satan’s jaws and the things that take place there. Perhaps this ambiguity resulted from the fact that the draftsman did not work with a fully developed infernal motif. Yet, because this imagery appears in a sanction, it may equally well be simply an incorrect rendering of a now lost or unknown older sanction or an unfortunate merging of two or more sanctions. This may explain the obvious lack of markers as to how the individual motifs relate to each other.

91_{Schmidt,Iconography, pp. 88-9.} 92_{See above, p. 84, n. 87.}